WHEN YOU GROW UP, SON, YOU CAN FILL IN THIS FORM AND TAKE A NUMBER YOURSELF

It's official: Britain is run by bureaucrats (The Telegraph, December 30th, 2005)

re has been a slight expansion in the numbers of front-line workers, the real bonanza has been in administration. Our public services resemble a South American army, where a handful of miserable conscripts sustain hundreds of self-important generals. The NHS, for example, uniquely in the world, now has more officials than beds.

The TaxPayers' Alliance, which deserves a medal for having trudged through an entire year's worth of Guardian appointments sections, estimates the total cost of these non-jobs in 2005 to be £787,319,556.31. This is bad enough. But think of the opportunity costs. Imagine if these battalions of bureaucrats were making or selling things, instead of plaguing the rest of us. How much more freely Britain would breathe.

The grim truth is that these positions are, in the main, not merely useless, but actively malign. There might be some sort of warped Keynesian argument for spending £800 million to keep a few thousand unemployables off the street, harmlessly sending each other memos and suing each other for sexual harassment.

But many state workers have a tangible and deleterious impact on public policy. A racism awareness counsellor needs to justify her salary by constantly finding instances of racism, so ensuring that her employers are distracted from their main business. A police force that hires diversity directors is not concentrating on catching scoundrels.

By bloating the state in this way, Labour has created a caste of people with a vested interest in pursuing certain policies. It doesn't much matter how we vote, nationally or locally, as long as decisions are in the hands of strategy co-ordinators and policy directors.

Mr Blair himself has run up against the immobilism of the public sector; how much more would a Tory administration. The sad fact is that, whoever is in office, Britain will still be run by overpaid jobsworths.

It is an almost universal modern conceit that our society is both freer and more democratic than, say, a hundred years ago. Perhaps we need this myth to protect us from the depressing horrors of facing open-eyed the combined effects of bureaucratic sovereignty, judicial supremacy and non-discretionary spending entitlements,